New start-up buys Stanford personal statements

[Andy Nguyen]

Stanford students looking for an extra buck or two can now earn cash by uploading their personal statements to the Essay Exchange. The new website says it aims to give disadvantaged high school students access to a cheap alternative to college counseling, but University officials are skeptical.

Started last August by three Harvard Business School alumni, the Essay Exchange pays $2 to current and former students at 25 elite universities every time a prospective applicant reads their admission essay.

Despite a slow start, the Essay Exchange gained popularity by advertising on Facebook and by word-of-mouth promotions from on-campus representatives. Since its launch, the website has gathered approximately 700 essays, including 128 essays from the Farm. Stanford is the second largest contributor after Harvard.

The Essay Exchange’s Stanford representative, D’Shai Hendricks ’14, said the majority of these essays came from the current freshman class.

“Initially, when I sent out the first e-mail, most people were confused about what it was,” Hendricks said. “ Later, most people basically understood it’s three minutes of your time, and it’s an opportunity to make money.”

“The [website] was founded on the premise that college admission is unfair,” said Essay Exchange co-founder and CEO Rory O’Connor. “Our goal is to make personalized college insight more accessible and more affordable.”
According to O’Connor, part of the website’s success comes from the idea that quantity makes quality.

“We offer a better selection,” O’Connor said. “The main advantage we have over books with application essays is that our selection is growing, and the options are changing all the time.”
In fact, the website’s virtual writing tutor is so personalized that high school students can search for personal statements that best match their individual backgrounds. Students are given a preview of each essay before they decide whether or not to buy it. Individual essays can be purchased for $7.50.

In the past, websites like the Essay Exchange have been criticized for allowing plagiarism. O’Connor, however, was confident that this problem could be avoided. His website does not allow users to copy, cut, paste or print personal statements.

“We have talked to over 100 admission officers,” O’Connor added. “We’re willing to work with them so that all of the essays are in their college admission department.”

According to Stanford Director of Admission Bob Patterson, representatives from the Essay Exchange have not contacted the University. He further noted that the website raises a red flag for plagiarism.

“When we read completed essays, we are able to discern if the essay was written by the applicant by making connections with the additional information the student provides,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.

Patterson said the University is engaged in a “discussion about what we want to do in the future” to combat plagiarism in the college application process.
One possibility is partnering with outside vendors who run authenticity checks on the admission essays, he said.

For others, the problem goes beyond plagiarism, and some college counselors remain unconvinced by the Essay Exchange’s stated purpose.

“I don’t think the inspiration for it truly came from any desire to level the playing field, since it doesn’t level the playing field in any substantive way,” Alice Kleeman, a college counselor at Menlo-Atherton High School, wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.

Kleeman said the website also defeats the purpose of making a personal statement personal. Such outside help makes it difficult to understand what role the personal statement plays in a student’s college application, she added.

“When students read too many sample essays, they begin to believe they need to write in the same style or about the same topics,” Kleeman said. “[What students] really need to do is to be themselves.”

According to Patterson, these sentiments can easily lead to plagiarism, especially when resources are so readily available.

“I do empathize with those students who feel the pressure to write a good essay,” Patterson said.
“However, when stress levels are so high, they can succumb to the temptation of plagiarism,” he added. “I am appalled with companies when they try to make profits from students at one of their most vulnerable stages in life.”

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/02/24/new-start-up-buys-stanford-personal-statements/

 

[DominiConnor]

I think the net result of this is good.

These statement are just bullshit that at best blur the signal of which applicants or worse give smokescreen for the prejudices of those running the process. They favour well prepped kids (like mine), over those with poorer backgrounds (like I was).

I don't know if this scheme will work but something like this will, and if this one flies then what we will see is that statements end up all looking pretty much the same, which is an excellent outcome.

This Patterson person exposes himself as a pompous twat. Fact is that plagiarism is already the norm, except it's carried out by people he seems to favour, ie kids from English speaking homes who can afford help. To me it's just as much plaigiarism if you or your school hire an expert to help you as when you scoop it off a web page.

He also demonstrates astonishing hypocrisy about "making profits from students".
What does he think pays his wages ?

In other words he's saying that the morality of an activity varies only with how much the person doing it is "someone like him".

 

[Barny]

Incredible, I actually had this exact same business idea about 2 years back, planning to get stuck in after I've finished my masters degree. The early bird catches the worm, always.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

@Barny
Execution is the name of the game. I've seen many people with great idea and other people making boatload of money with a mediocre execution of the same idea.

 

[DominiConnor]

Andy is 100% right about execution.

This idea is part of a large scale trend of open source, which doesn't just apply to software.

Much of education is based around knowledge, since it dates from a time when you had to know stuff else you'd have to waste days or weeks finding it in a book.
That's wildly untrue now. Kids need to learn how to search and evaluate what they find, precious little of that happens since even though the average teacher is 10 years younger than me, their attitude is more primitive than that of my father who was born during WW I

Although exact details of many things are hidden or viciously complex, armed only with google you can find out the general principles of anything in our culture down to a good detail of precision without leaving your chair. That's not just convenient, it's different. The role of your memory is no longer so much the main store as a cache for the vast amount of information you can access.

I date from when there was a vicious debate about whether calculators were allowable in exams, and still have a slide rule, which my kids (armed with Mathematica, Matlab and 100 meg fibre internet) find surprisingly cool.

For the same money as my first calculator you can buy a tablet that can do symbolic calculus to undergrad level, and a heroic amount of algebra. Should that be allowed in exams ? In real life, you'd have these things, so why make people do something they'd never do in real life ? Should we have athletes make their own trainers ? Should a nuclear physicist do a stint in a uranium mine, sure you'd learn stuff, but would it make you better ?

I learned to read and compose text from reading the work of others, and going back to the example of this "personal statement" bullshit those who have access to good essays can learn what works. You only get one shot at this, so even a seriously sharp kid has no opportunity to learn.

...so he needs examples. That's not plagiarism, you need to learn the game.

 

[Barny]

@Barny
Execution is the name of the game. I've seen many people with great idea and other people making boatload of money with a mediocre execution of the same idea.

Of course, I'm well versed in the theory of entrepreneurship, ideas are mostly worthless (try and sell one to Joe Public on the street for instance) and they're certainly not a business. I was just hoping that nobody else had my idea and I could start executing once I had time after my masters, but I've been thoroughly beaten. Oh well, I've got lots of ideas up my sleeve which need putting into action

Dominic - I completely agree. I've lost count of the amount of times I've spent a great deal of time learning something only to find out when I started doing research that Mathematica does it for you in 2 lines of code.

Also, what I think is the biggest farce of modern day science education is that people are not taught how to do scientific programming properly. I had an introductory course in Matlab (this is a loop, this is a function) and that was it - and now I discover that you can simulate atomic clusters, atomic lattices, planetary orbits, and a whole host of other stuff with Matlab in a couple of hundred lines. Learning how to do that would have been infinitely more useful than most of the stuff I learnt during my degree, and actually it aids understanding so much more when you can just tweak around with your model/program a little bit and discover new phenomena which is impossible to learn just from a textbook.

I tend to think that memory skills should be more and more marginalized in education these days. The ability to understand information you're given, and work with it, is a far more useful skill then being able to remember lots of stuff.

 

[DominiConnor]

If I may, I'd like to refine that to be "ideas as mostly worthless on their own", and we don't really disagree.

I constantly feed ideas into my kids and leave the boring grind of supervising spelling and multiplication tables to others.
Thus 2.0 could explain why Reals were countable and how there are as many primes as even numbers before he could reliably multiply 12 * 17.
Tools like Mathematica (and a pushy father) allow kids to move forward faster to the interesting bits. "Interesting" is subjective, but does not include arithmetic. Ideas constitute a vocabulary that you can use to express yourself, and the more you are exposed to, the better.

I believe entrepreneurship can be taught and not everyone agrees with that.

That's because of the 'vocabulary' factor in success.

Who here knows about what marketing people call a "contra deal" ?
That's important to my business since it reduces our marketing costs by 75%, not sufficient for a successful business, but damned useful.

One thing I learned whilst in publishing the #mag was why the #1 computer mag did so very well.
It was more expensive than ours and less good. But because the margins of most publications were often a fixed % ,the retailer made more per unit of shelf space so would stock that over ours because his business model was very much as if he rented shelf space to magazine publishers.

I suspect that not one person reading this will ever publish a magazine, but there is a pattern & model here that one day just might help you make a better business decision when you rely upon others to sell your output. There are thousands of these, and I won't claim to have a knowledge of even a majority of them and certainly not all, but knowing this stuff makes you a better entrepreneur.

 

[Yike Lu]

Thus 2.0 could explain why Reals were countable and how there are as many primes as even numbers before he could reliably multiply 12 * 17.
Tools like Mathematica (and a pushy father) allow kids to move forward faster to the interesting bits. "Interesting" is subjective, but does not include arithmetic. Ideas constitute a vocabulary that you can use to express yourself, and the more you are exposed to, the better.

Reminds me of a Star Trek episode where a little 8 year old kid runs out of a classroom crying to his parents... "But MOMMY, I don't WANNA learn calculus!!!!"